Porcupine Tree – The Incident

Ummm… I didn’t know you could review music albums on Unilocal… but I will have to agree with Sami. First of all, Porcupine Tree is the best band in the entire world, and their latest album, The Incident, is simply brilliant! It is a concept album which means it is 55 minutes long from start to finish. It is dynamic and beautifully produced, and the live performance is intense! I have a signed copy of the Special Edition, and since I got it, I absolutely have to listen to it every single day. I even go to sleep to it sometimes. I don’t care what my neighbors think, either — they could use some exposure to great music!

If you like Pink Floyd with some Tool touches, Porcupine Tree is THE band for you. By far PT is my favorite band of all time. The brain behind this wonderful music is Steven Wilson. The production is top notch!
I listened to this album at 4am (Jet lag), and believe me that the music was so powerful that I thought I was high or something!
It is a concept album where the songs are connected and unified by one theme.
This is what Steven Wilson had to say about the album:
«The original idea for The Incident came really from external things, for example stories you would see on the media and the way the media use this word ‘incident’. It’s fascinating when you watch the news how the media chooses to personalise certain stories and to depersonalise some stories … For example, an earthquake in India that kills 10.000 people will be described as ‘an incident’. It’s very depersonalised and very distanced. You’re not expected to relate very emotionally to the story. Michael Jackson dying on the other hand, the way the media portrayed that story was in a very emotional, very personal way. It wasn’t the same dispassionate coverage that would be used for an earthquake in India. Of course we understand why that is, because we all know who Michael Jackson is. We all feel like we have some knowledge of him as a person. So we can relate to him as a person in a way that we don’t necessarily relate to people in India that we don’t know.
When you start to watch the news you do start to notice these shifts in emphasis between the very dispassionate and the very emotional. I began to be fascinated with this word ‘incident’, the way it’s used to almost distance some of these in most cases very traumatic events like homicide, kidnaps, child abuse, natural tragedies. The word ‘incident’ was used in a way to distance. So I started to pick out some of these stories from the news and write about them, almost in an attempt to put some emotional resent back in. I took a story about a religious cult in America, a story about a body being found in a river, I took the original incident which was a road accident that I experienced first hand and I began to write about these things from a more personal perspective. So that’s where the original idea of The Incident came from.
That then let me further into thinking about incidents in my own life. Traumatic and otherwise, sometimes good incidents which had changed the course of my life and, if you like, after which things were never the same again. A kind of personal, autobiographical aspect came back into the music. So it’s a bit of a mixture in a way. I don’t want to say that this is a very strong concept, it’s a quite loose concept. It’s a loose theme that runs through, but for me the concept is in the music this time. The lyrical concept is quite loose, but still there’s a theme that runs through. A theme that I could kind of sum up as being ‘things after which the path of life has been changed’ or after which ‘things never will be the same again’ for the individual concerned.»